


The Inexorable Sadness of Pencils

by MJ (mjr91)



Series: The "Pencils" Cycle [2]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: M/M, Pencils
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-26
Updated: 2012-04-26
Packaged: 2017-11-04 08:53:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,112
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/392021
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mjr91/pseuds/MJ
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A rainy day at the Hoover Building inspires Walter Skinner to take a chance he would otherwise have missed.  Part I of the Pencils series.</p>
<p>Winner of several on-line XF writing awards back during the heyday of XF fandom.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Inexorable Sadness of Pencils

**Author's Note:**

> The title, and Mulder's quote, are from Theodore Roethke's poem, "Dolor".

It is raining outside. I draw the blinds in my office. Washington is beautiful during a spring rain or an early autumn thunderstorm, but this is neither. It is a sudden downpour, water splashing over curbs, tires at intersections ruining suits with water mixed with dirt and oil. There is no beauty in it, only an overpouring of ugliness. Women and men soaked to their skin through their work clothes like so many wet kittens. I saw a group of villagers once in Vietnam, caught in a downpour. They were enjoying themselves in the cold rain. They didn't have another four hours of sitting in vinyl chairs in climate-controlled offices, trying not to drip all over important papers while freezing their asses off. The blinds cut off the sights outside. I am safe, momentarily, insulated from the ugliness outside.

The buzzer on my intercom goes off. It is Kimberly, my secretary - who else could it be? Someone wants to see me. It happens every day; everyone wants a moment of my time, half of an idea, a pinch here, jab there; here, I want to tell them, here is a knife. Each of you, take your pound of flesh and leave me alone. I was told this job was a promotion. It is that, I suppose. More responsibility, more salary, closer to the throne. It is all that, and more. It is sending agents out to be shot at. It is calling their wives to tell them that their husbands have been shot. It is deciding whether some other human's tragedy is worthy of my agents' time and attention. It is thankless, and friendless. Is it what I would choose if I were to be given the chance again, knowing what I know now? I do not know. Someone wants to see me - send them in; let them take their pound and leave. I seat myself behind my desk, hoping that I am in my properly imposing attitude, the one that is not really me, and pick up a pencil. Surely I will have to make notes of this other human's distress before I offer my pound of flesh up for their consumption.

It is not a "someone" who enters; it is "Someone," in specific. It is not merely anyone, it is Fox Mulder, bane and joy of my existence. He plagues me incessantly with the most absurd demands - which I grant, more often than not; and I do so for the juvenile pleasure I take in seeing his delight. He is the most beautiful man I have ever seen, irritating though he can be, and often is. I cannot call him handsome. I have been told that I am handsome, though I don't believe it; but if that is a term which describes my appearance, then it cannot apply to Fox Mulder. He is tall, though not so tall as I am; he is well built, though slight in comparison to my bulk. I am a weight lifter, he a swimmer. And he is beautiful. His hair, his eyes, his lips - a thousand women would sacrifice anything for just such features. Most men, I think, would look in envy and then turn down the offer of such attributes. They are too perfect, too delicate, in their way, to be masculine. And yet I have seen this man fight, and even kill, when he has had to; the delicacy is only superficial. He is tall, and slender, and beautiful, and brilliant. His mind dazzles me. It is like a trapeze artist, climbing to places you can see, but you dare not follow for fear of falling. And then it makes leaps - absurd, impossible leaps that a human should not attempt. Like the trapeze artist, he succeeds, leaving me behind to wonder at the feats that another human has learned to accomplish, which I have discovered far too late to learn myself. I can only step back and admire respectfully.

He thinks that I am hard on him. He's right. I am hard on him, harder than I am with my other agents. I need to do this - both for him and for myself. For him, because he is an island of gems in a sea of mediocrity. I must demand that he give me his best, or his talents are wasted among the ranks of fools and court jesters here in the castle. For his work to look like anyone else's is for Picasso to draw in crayon on tablet paper, or for Hemingway to write the radio traffic report. I refuse to let him sell his soul for the sake of simplicity in this establishment. For me, because not to come down on Fox Mulder like a steamroller is to court my own disaster. If I cannot maintain a base level of annoyance to direct at him, I risk exposing my actual feelings for him, and that is something I have never believed I can risk. There is a paper clip on my desk. I shall twist it out of shape while he and I talk, even as I twist my own feelings out of shape, that I may deny my feeling them.

He comments on the weather. I agree with him that it is a miserable day -dark, gloomy, despairing. It is the sort of day, one imagines, that increases the suicide rate in the area where it occurs. We make the usual small talk of agent and assistant director. He is his usual self - pugnacious, charming, alternately all argument and all smoothing of feathers. His smile is the one bright thing I have seen on this gloomy day, in which the sun has not deigned to make an appearance. I see the white flash of his teeth, and I feel warmed, as if the sun had indeed emerged from behind its dark hiding place; but no, it is not an outer warmth that I feel. It is one I have felt near Mulder before; it is a flooding of warmth throughout my entire body, and its focal point is at my groin. It is desire making itself known. I can feel my erection growing, stiffening and pressing into the zipper of my suit trousers. I want him. It is as simple as that. And I give him what he wants in the hope that he will someday reciprocate, even though it is impossible that such a thing should happen between us.

Today he is asking me to authorize a trip to New Mexico. There are a set of talking boulders there, and a series of murders has happened near the site. Ritual murders? Who knows? The whole thing is ridiculous, of course; or else his mind, which moves so quickly that I cannot keep up with it, has lit upon some infinitesimal detail that no one else can spot. His mind is a hummingbird, difficult to see, wings fluttering so rapidly that their motion cannot be detected, drinking from a drop of nectar that the human eye cannot find. Lunacy or brilliance? There is only one way we can know this, the way that pleases him, and makes him smile, giving me the foolish thrill I derive from such things. I pick up a pen, scrawl my name across the signature line in broad strokes, and thrust the completed document into a manila folder on my desk. The interplay of hands, pen, paper, and file takes only seconds. It is this easy to make him smile, and once again he does. Once again, the sun rises in my office, momentarily blinding me. I blink. The line of poetry from college crosses my mind - "mine eyes dazzle; she died young." Not this one, oh Lord. Not this one. He's come close enough to that far too often for my liking.

What's wrong? he asks me. Nothing, only the maudlin thoughts accompanying snatches of morbid poetry taken out of context. But I can't bring myself to say that, not even to this man, the only person I know who might take that statement at face value and understand what I mean. So I hold back, and I shake my head. The irrelevant thought of his death has made me inexpressibly sad; there is no way I can explain how it came to my head other than this weather. I move my twisted paper clip; I adjust the placement of a pen, straighten out a stack of files beside them. He is speaking again.  
"I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils, Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paperweight, All the misery of manilla folders and mucilage, Desolation in lonely public places, Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard, The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher, Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma, Endless duplication of lives and objects."

I look up. I can tell that he is quoting, but I have never heard it before. I do not know these words, but today, they know me. They know me far too well for comfort; they have wrenched themselves out of my gut. Is he quoting a poem, or performing some other feat of mental gymnastics and reading my depression? I nod at him; it is all that I can do. The hazel eyes look across, staring at me - no, through me, as if everything in me were laid open for examination. He is smiling slightly, but I sense that he is weighing, judging, analyzing. Divide and conquer. Why I think it, I do not know. Now that I have said them, they are fitting words for the psychic surgery I feel being performed upon my soul.

Mulder smiles at me again, only a small one, lips closed. We are not working now; we are both sitting; me with my sad pencils, he weighing, dividing, and, apparently, approving. How is it that I have let this man suddenly become the arbiter of my thoughts? It occurs to me that all the while I have sat here, every time he has been in this room, I have tried to think of ways to prevent myself from taking him; it seems that I have been so busy defending my front that the enemy has crept behind and taken me instead. In trying to prevent myself from acting, I have been reacting, and I feel my reactions placing me squarely in his hands. Not that this is inherently a problem; his hands are, like the rest of him, things of beauty. They are long, slender, tapering; larger than a woman's, they are nonetheless perfect models for a woman's hands. My cock stirs again as the vision of those hands touching me comes to mind. We appear to be lounging in our respective chairs at the moment, but we are locked in combat; the tension is mounting between us as my arousal mounts, and it is an arousal of which he must be vividly aware, reading my thoughts as he is right now. It is too late for either of us to back out of this pas de deux gracefully; we must complete this dance now that we have begun it. Which of us plans to take the next step?

I begin to rise in my seat, casually, as if there were nothing I would rather do than walk about my office. I step away from my desk towards the window, stopping to peek outside. It is still raining, although the torrent is slowing. My erection is still there, but my stomach is in knots. The air is brittle around us, as though a sudden movement would shatter it. Mulder is pretending to examine his hands, those wonderful hands, but he is shifting his gaze out of the corner of his eye. I am reminded for a second of my youth - I almost said, "the old days," but I am not that old. Seductions were always tricky then, at least for me; you took each step as if it might be your last, allowing each party to the game the opportunity to back out at all times until the inevitable moment, hoping and praying that the object of interest was indeed available, and not likely to become offended and hit you. There is that same caution between us; we are wary of each other. The tension itself is erotically charged; my cock is throbbing, aching for the touch of those fingers I saw just a moment ago. I swallow; I can feel my face flushing.

He shifts in his seat, just fractionally, as I walk across the room. I am behind him now, sorting a pile of files meaninglessly; I am acting as if I am working, when clearly I am not. He is not watching me, but he is perfectly calm, perfectly composed, or so it seems. He is waiting for me to come back over by way of his chair, which is precisely what I had intended to do. His action now is to do nothing at all, but to do it with an air of perfect expectation. I suspect he is laughing at my hesitancy; I cannot see his face yet, but I do not think I need to. I head back in his direction, closing my circuit of the office; coming up behind his chair, I lay one hand, gently and, I hope, casually, upon his shoulder. I feel as if I had just touched an electrical wire; I can feel the voltage through my hand and up my arm. Will he react, or do I continue?

He reacts. He leans further back in the seat, tilting his head backwards so that my gaze is no longer directly down on that obscenely luxurious head of hair, the one that fills me with envy when I contemplate its richness. I can see the hazel eyes, brighter than I had imagined. His pupils are dilated; it is the brightness of lust I see in them. I needed to see this, to know that I am not mistaken; he wants this as much as I do. What I do now is incredibly stupid of me, I have no doubt of that. It is, however, the only thing I want or am able, right now, to imagine wanting. I bend down to plant a kiss at his hairline, very near to where another man had once attacked it, with Mulder's permission, with a drill. I can see a faint trace of the scar it left; I kiss that, too, even more softly. His hand - that beautiful hand, with a life of its own - raises to caress my cheek. I almost back away; the sweetness of the contact is almost unbearable. My hand on his shoulder, his hand on my cheek -I can feel the energy moving between us; we have created a circuit. I am blinded again, not, this time, by light, but by the feeling of my whole body raging. My breath is ragged; the movement of my breath in my chest is almost painful to me.

He has disengaged himself from me; he rises and turns with the grace of a Siamese cat to meet me. It flashes through my mind that I should lock my door, but I am rooted here; surely Kim will keep the hounds at bay for me as she always does. This is crazy; this is wrong; I'm his direct superior... but it is already too late to turn back; I have already kissed him, and there is no undoing that. My arms are around him, over his suit jacket; I move one hand up to his neck, to pull his mouth to mine. His lips are lush, soft; I feel myself sinking into this kiss. I nip gently at his lower lip, running my tongue across it. I have wanted to do this since the day I met him. It was the first part of his body that I dreamed of claiming for myself. As I do so now, I feel his lips parting under mine. My kiss deepens against him; my tongue slides forward, meeting his. I bring my other hand to his face, anchoring him firmly for this assault on his mouth. His arms are around me, under my jacket; they are around my hips, bringing my groin into contact with his. I can feel his erection, as hard as mine, pressing into me, branding my thigh with its heat. I imagine the feeling of our bodies pressing together like this naked, in my bed. The thought, the vision of his lithe swimmer's body unclothed against mine, is intoxicating; I am dizzy with the image of it. I picture him lying on the edge of my bed, as I kneel at the side and take him in my mouth. I want to taste all of him, not just his lips; I want to taste his neck, his nipples, that cock I feel straining against me. I want him to come in my mouth. I want to taste that, too. I think I know how he will taste, salty but bitter, like the sea he swims in every summer. Like the answers he finds in his search for truth - enough salt to give life, enough bitterness to give pain.  
Mulder lets go of my hips and seizes my head in both of his hands. His hands are so strong; they do not look as if they could be this strong, but they are. Their elegance is misleading, as are so many things about this man. Now he is the one keeping my head still; his kiss has become aggressive, forceful; he is beginning to take charge of this seduction, not I. But then, he has been in charge of this moment all along, knowing my thoughts, anticipating my actions. His lips move to my neck - God, what is he doing to my neck? I feel a small row of nips behind my ear before he begins to attack my earlobe itself. He is no helpless virgin, this man; such skills come with practice. He may be more experienced than I, I realize; it has been so long since I have had another man in my arms this way. I had almost forgotten the specific pleasures of another man: the firmness of the other body, so much like my own; the strength of the embrace; the fierceness of the union; the instinctive knowledge of how to give pleasure to the other. Sharon could give me none of these; no woman could. My few encounters with other men since my marriage have been quick and thankless, lacking the intensity of my prior relations with lovers. I can feel that intensity again with Mulder; he has a feeling of focus, of singleness of purpose, in his actions; no desire to rush to get home to whoever it is that has no idea what her man is out doing, no "let me get my rocks off and split" rush to his actions. It occurs to me that what I have missed from another man is not sex, it is lovemaking.

I want to lose myself in this man, to bury my face in his hair, his neck, the crack of that perfect ass I feel under my hands. My hands find his neck, loosening his tie, opening his collar. I need more of him. His hands are against my chest now, those fingers of his working their way through my shirt, finding my nipples. My nipples have never been this sensitive before; his touch on either is electric, as if he had already found his way to my cock. My body is no longer under my control, it is entirely possessed by his hands, his lips. For this moment, I am his. He knows it, too; there is a gleam in his eyes that is not entirely lust. It is the look a runner has at the end of a marathon, or that a climber has at the top of a mountain; it is a look of accomplishment, of victory. He is entitled to it; he has conquered me. I back up, half-sitting on the edge of my desk; I lower myself, acknowledging the fact of his triumph. He kisses me again, letting go of my body long enough to shrug off his jacket, and then to reach over to help me out of mine. Hie moves his hands to my shoulders; feeling a knot, he begins to massage them through my shirt. His hands amaze me. I want - no, need - to feel them on my erection, manipulating my shaft; I want him to bring me off with those hands. To do that myself is a joyless release; his touch would be an entirely different matter. I want that as surely as I want him in my mouth, as surely as I can feel my tongue running over the twin orbs beneath his own erection.

My head is against his chest; I can feel the pounding of his heart - and it is pounding - as he works his hands gently over my shoulders and back. Our legs are scissored; his thigh pressed against my erect cock, his erection pulsing against my hip as I balance on the desk. We have both become gentler, less frenzied, since his dominance here became clear to us; we are no longer battling to see who will lead in the dance.

I shift slightly - too much, it appears; I manage to knock over a pencil cup. We ignore the clatter, and the clutter on my desk, but although it has not ruined my mood, it has caused me to think. Do I really want to continue this here, among pens, pencils, paper clips, and stacks of files? Do I want to make love to this man next to the intercom that has disturbed many of my most serene moments with announcements that the Director wishes to speak to me? I am not a stranger to the office quickie, but that is not what I want from this man. We have already spent longer at the barest preliminaries than the time needed to finish a quick office fuck, or even two of them. And interruption that could ruin this mood could come at any time this miserable, wet afternoon. I seize his hands in mine, and force them away from me very gently, very regretfully. "Not here," I whisper to him softly. "Not now."

He is sensitive, this agent. I have known spent roses to hold themselves in one piece for longer than it takes Fox Mulder to wilt. He cannot be cast aside lightly. And I have no intention of doing so. However, he looks at me, chagrined. "I thought you wanted this." He hangs his head.

I am still seated on the desk, still holding his hands. I hold them more tightly now. "I do. As much as you do. But do you really want our first time to be here on the desk? Call me old-fashioned, but I'd rather we went someplace a little quieter and a lot more comfortable - like my place tonight, after dinner. Do you have a problem with that?"

He looks at me again, now thoughtful. He misses nothing. "Our first time?"

"We haven't done this before, Mulder, or else I've lost my memory. And you weren't planning to seduce your direct superior into a one-night stand, were you?"

Mulder smiles at me. No, he grins at me. It may be storming in the streets outside, but the sun blazes in here. "I didn't want to make any presumptions, Sir."

"Believe me, Agent Mulder, you have my permission to presume all you like." I draw him back to me, and, reaching up, draw his lips to mine. "Now, get back to your office, and try to convince Scully that you're thinking about work for a couple of hours. You have an appointment to meet me at four-thirty. Is that clear?"

He nods, his eyes alight with fire. "Yes, Sir. Perfectly clear." He picks up one of my sharpened pencils and aims at a ceiling tile. To my amusement and regret, it sticks. He smirks, the bastard. "See you at four-thirty." He is out of my office before I realize that he left his jacket here. I wonder what he'll tell Scully he did with his jacket.. I wonder how I'll get that pencil down from the ceiling. I wonder why I let that man drive me crazy like this. I wonder where we'll go for dinner. I wonder what kind of underwear he's got on. I intend to find out tonight. I wonder if it's love. I intend to find that out, too.


End file.
